Face in hands

Previously, I wrote about how to plan for potential problems with your company’s social media campaigns. Today, let’s think about how to right the ship, so to speak. Recently, HotelNewsNow published some advice about how to recover from a social media crisis. Though the site is geared towards hotel administrators, the tips ring true regardless of your business.

Be sure to read through the article and think about how you would specifically implement each piece of advice. As with most any advice of this nature, preparedness, quick action and honesty are key. Be sure to keep that in mind while you are struggling with your message in response to the crisis. How quickly you respond and how honest you are can often be more important that the message itself.

While reading about advances and ideas on how to grow your business through online marketing are plenty helpful, you should also keep your eyes out for advice and warnings about potential problems that may befall you. Not to sound too much like your older relatives, but the Internet can be a dark and seedy place. In the context of social media, it can be an interconnected place where bad news travels fast.

That’s why Prasanna Bidkar recently wrote an article for Business2Community highlighting 5 potential problems that could ruin your business’s reputation. In it, he points to disgruntled employees, poor products and leaked documents that could all lead to your hard earned reputation online going down the drain.

There aren’t many solutions in the article, but that may actually be good for you. This way, you can think about potential problems and how you and your company should deal with them, not prescribe someone else’s solution to your situation.

Building Blocks

Regardless of your expertise in social media marketing, it’s always helpful to go back and review the basics from time to time and compare your company’s campaigns and strategies to these building blocks. Have you set a secure, stable foundation? Are you working efficiently to save time and money?

Leiden Johnson, of Business2Community, has a few of these social media marketing basics for you to keep in mind. Make sure you haven’t strayed too far from the path in your own campaigns.

Pay-per-click advertising, such as Google AdWords, can offer a variety of benefits for your company, but you should also be aware of the things it cannot do. Unfortunately, there is a lot of chatter that creates myths about the capabilities of PPC advertising. Lisa Raehsler of Clickz recently set out to debunk some of these myths.

1. PPC and Instant Sales

Don’t expect to start your AdWords account, then kick back and watch your sales numbers soar. You’ll need time to tweak your campaigns and hone in on your target audience. This is especially true for niche markets.

2. PPC Isn’t A Cure All

There are times when pausing your PPC campaigns is actually the best option. Don’t rely on them to help sales rebound in all situations.

3. Consider More Than Conversions

Just because an ad doesn’t directly lead to a conversion doesn’t mean it isn’t doing its job. Many consumers need multiple interactions before they will turn into a conversion. Your ad may have just opened the door for a future conversion.

4. PPC and SEO

There are plenty of people who have pushed the rumor that companies who advertise with AdWords receive better position in Google search. It’s simply not true.

5. The Top Spot Isn’t Tops

Many times, the top spot will perform best in sales, but you’ll also be paying for that position. The conversion rate for lower positions can sometimes beat that number 1 spot and you’ll pay a much lower premium.

You may have heard of Zappos, a web site known primarily for selling shoes. They recently revealed some of their online marketing strategy, including some successes and failures, that could be helpful to many businesses, both big and small, as Laura Stampler reports for Business Insider.

For instance, Zappos’ Digital Marketing Director calls sponsored posts on Facebook “a necessary evil” and “the difference between 1000 likes versus 10.”

He also discusses a shift in their message on Facebook. Rather than talking about what was happening locally around and in their home offices, they emphasize their products and have seen an increased response. This particularly seems like a simple and obvious change, but one that might be helpful to apply to your own Facebook page.

One other important message from Zappos was the far reaching effect of the right wording. Posting an identical message, but with slightly improved wording can be the difference between seeing 10 people share your story and 100. Zappos saw a 7-percent increase in users who created a story on social media about their purchases after such a slight change in verbiage. That adds up to a much larger audience over time.

 

Wrist Watch

Your daily schedule is pretty tightly booked. Usually, trying to cram in some time to optimize your AdWords campaigns to get the most out of your online advertising budget is pretty low on the list of priorities. But, if you put in a little time upfront, you can run an efficient and effective campaign for just minutes a day.

That’s the premise that Ben Cohen works from in his article for Business2Community. He’ll tell you where to allocate your precious time and how to set up your account so you can manage it quickly and get on to your other duties. If you have an AdWords account already, you understand how valuable this information could be. If you’ve been hesitant to start an account because it is so time consuming, this could be just what you need to get started.

Smartphone

AdWords’ cost-per-click has fallen over the last five quarters. Perhaps that’s why there recent efforts have been to enhance their keyword advertising with respects to mobile users.

As Steven Musil reports for CNet, Google’s AdWords Enhanced Campaign seeks to simplify advertiser’s experience when dealing with multiple device platforms. As with most advertising platforms, there is still a mystery surrounding how to get mobile users, on tablets and smart phones, to click ads the way desktop and laptop users will.

The AdWords Enhanced Campaign also includes ad copy, links and extensions for mobile optimized ads. Ideally, this is an update that helps both advertisers and Google without sacrificing user experience, but that may be too idealistic to hope for.

The simple goal for your AdWords campaign should be to get the most conversions possible while spending the least money possible. If you have a good ratio here, you’re likely doing everything right. However, there are plenty of potential pitfalls to avoid in order to lose out on conversions or spend way too much in getting them.

Check out Patrick McDaniel’s tips at Business2Community and find out if you could be saving money somewhere or getting more out of your campaigns.

When marketing your business through social media, it can be easy to hit a proverbial wall and decide that everything worth doing has already been done. When you find yourself stuck in this rut, it can be extremely helpful to read about the innovative ways other companies are using social media. This will hopefully inspire you to put your own spin on a particularly interesting or engaging campaign, rather than solidify your thought that everything has already been thought of.

David Moth has a fantastic list of excellence in social media at Econsultancy. Some even come with a disclaimer that they’re no longer possible since they bent the rules of a specific social media platform, but that should encourage you to bend your own rules.

When it comes to online marketing, images are very in. Facebook has taken notice and plans to up their advertising haul by expanding image size within their sidebar ads and tweaking the format.

Jennifer Van Grove, of CNet, writes that Facebook is currently testing the new ads on a small percentage of U.S. users’ screens. The image is larger and stretches from border to border of the right-hand column. Ad text, including a bold headline then appears underneath the ad.

This change makes Facebook ads more attractive to users, which in turn makes them more attractive for advertisers and brings in more money for Facebook.